OCZ Vertex 450 256GB Review

Today we are looking at the latest OCZ SSD – the Vertex 450 256GB. OCZ purchased Indilinx in 2011 and they have been slowly building up a range of drives featuring their Barefoot 3 controller. We have already reviewed several solid state drives featuring this controller and they have all delivered fantastic results. Can the Vertex 450 live up to the same standards we expect from OCZ this year?

OCZ have had a lot of success in the Solid State market in recent years, even though they had their fair share of issues with SandForce firmware. When Samsung and Intel released their last range of solid state drives, it was clear OCZ needed to adapt with the times and target a new audience, by focusing on their own controllers.

I was very impressed with the OCZ Vector performance when we reviewed the 256GB model late last year. It was easily one of the fastest, most capable drives on the market, regardless of price. That said, Samsung have had great success in the last year with their 840 Pro drives and it was able to perform at a similar level to the Vector.

It makes sense that OCZ would update their range and release a second series of Solid State drives using a slightly tweaked version of the BareFoot 3 controller. At a more competitive price point.

The Vertex 450 is clearly still focused at appealing to the performance user, but OCZ needed to release something at a slightly more competitive price point to deal with high profile competitors, such as Samsung. This new drive uses the Barefoot 3 M10 controller which features a power optimised clock generator which operates at a slightly reduced speed.

This helps to improve yields and will help reduce the price to the consumer. This controller also supported AES 256 encryption and 20nm lithography NANA. IOPS performance is said to be excellent and we will look at this later in the review.

OCZ Vertex 450 Features:

Sata 3.0 6Gb/s interface.

Proprietary Barefoot 3 M10 series controller.

20nm IMFT MLC NAND Flash.

2.5 inch 7mm form factor.

128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities.

Advanced suite of flash management to increase durability and reliability.

High performance and endurance without compression/loss of usable capacity.